Finally, I’m back on CGT! After a long time of only reading, I think it’s time to show I’m still alive! :bounce:

As you’ll have noticed while… reading this thread, I begin quite late with the real work for this challenge, but in fact I’ve been thinking and working about it from the day the topic was announced. It’s only that I’m being so busy with schoolwork, that I didn’t find time to really work on it. I’m very happy to be back in the challenge, and to meet up again with all the cool people who were also my collegues during the past other challenges.

But now, finally, 10 days before the deadline, I’ll begin working hard on it.

To show you I haven’t been sitting still the past months, I’ll post some conceptartwork. In fact it are only some speedpaints of some ideas I could use in my challenge artwork (as I want to approach the topic in the surreal way).

Since the last ‘The Journey Begins’ challenge I’ve been working on my painting skills, and its time to let them out! I will work mainly in Photoshop (7) with tablet, and I also plan to use some 3D-rendered elements for the solid/rigid objects (that way I take ultimate advantage of the possibility to work with 2D and 3D tools).

I think I’ll be making some coffee to drink during the upcoming 1,5 week…

I painted this concept while knowing not very much about ‘what EON was’. I only had looked at some artwork of other entrants.

Don’t ask me why I have put a nose in the middle of it, because I don’t know it too. It’s just ‘something that doesn’t make sense’, so I thought it would fit nicely. As you’ll noticed it’s not finished or so, but just ‘an idea’.

I’ve bought ‘The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy’ (by Tim Burton(!)) some weeks ago, so I think I can get some inspiration from that, to produce some utterly surreal artwork!

I made this concept after some more brainstorming than with the previous two concepts, and I even based it a bit on the chapter of the ‘Sixth Chamber’ (after reading that). I plan to having my final artwork looking a bit like this: with two stonewalls, and on them some porcelain objects (such as a teapot and a toilet). I plan to render those objects in 3dsmax, to have some nice believable rendering of them.

And here you see another more serious attempt for an interesting concept. An octopus in a uge teapot, is operating a marionette that’s hanging inside of the building. The sketch is not finished, so you have to imagine what the marionette looks like.

I think I’ll mainly use this idea and the previous for my final artwork.

I think it might be clear to you now that I’m trying to avoid the chiché-Scifi-look, and to make something more dared!

This will be the last conceptart for this moment. Have a nice day/night!
-Gijs

I’m still on the run for the deadline! The fact that the deadline was moved from two weeks ago to coming wednesday is very cool, because the week of the original deadline was allready full of (study) deadlines for me. This way I think I’ll still be able to finish ‘something’ in time.

On this image you see some artwork that inspired me for the concept I choose. You can see I’m trying to go more into the surreal direction, with also some influences from mr Miyazaki. On next steps it will get more clear how I will combine the elements.

Further updates very soon!
[All works are from the artists I credited with it. If you’re one of the artists and you don’t like your artwork to be ‘used’ in this image, PM me, then I can remove it from this collage.]

Octopus playing with puppet-conductor ~ slimy-miyazaki-creature playing music and sweating slime ~ slime goes down the toilet ~ octopus lives from the slime…

That’s the circle of ‘this world’s life’…

I’m going to depict that ‘symbolic circle’ in my artwork. The only problem at this point is that I’m uncertain if my image will fit the theme good enough, because it fits more symbolic then directly with EON. (Because the idea is that the Sixth Chamber is also kept alive by an artificial circle of life/nature)

The creature you see here is much inspirated by the slimy creature in Miyazaki’s ‘Spirited Away’. It will be sitting on the toilet, playing a musical instrument, and with all creatures together it will form an orchestra, leaded by the conductor.

At my study (Industrial Design) I got my very first Photoshop lesson (because all other things where self-taught and self-discovered ), and I learned a quick technique to shade/render a concept in Photoshop. In basic it’s like this:

You make a line-drawing, scan it, trace it in a vector-application

You shade (dodge&burn) and color it in Photoshop, using the magic-wand tool to make selections of the vector shapes.

In my workflow I add an extra step:
3) Making it look more painterly and detailing it (with brushes).

I’ve depicted this three steps in the image.

My planning of the process in the upcoming 5 days and 2 hours :
[ol]
[li] Sketching (pencil&paper)[/li][li] Create an appealing composition with those shapes in the vector-app (in my case: CorelDraw)[/li][li] Modelling a simple 3D scene[/li][li] Detailed modelling the main rigid objects in the scene (like the toilets)[/li][li] Rendering those 3D elements with nice lighting[/li][li] Simple dodge&burn shading and coloring of the vector-line-drawing in Photoshop, and placing the 3D rendered objects into it[/li][li]Overpainting the ‘mockup-scene’ and making it more detailed (‘step 3’ on the image in this post), but keeping the rendered-objects intact (that will give it an interesting touch: ‘perfect’ rendered objects in a painterly scene)[/li][li] Uploading it[/li][li] Drinking a beer and eating cookies[/li][li] Sleep![/li][/ol]
So… Let’s hope I’ll get all those 9 steps done within those 5 days!

@ artvandeley: Torsten, I’m really honored you posted (as the first one!) in my thread, as your image for The Journey Begins was really… spectacular! Its a true masterpiece! It’s a shame I’m so busy on my study, so I didn’t have too much interaction with other partipicants (like you) on this challenge. What I’ve seen so fast of your entry is really cool and in every case ‘more fitting the theme’… I’m just trying to be different, and it’s great to hear you like that. Lots thanks for the post (gave me more energy ), and all the best on finishing your entry!

Here I show you the step in my workflow I called ‘creating an interesting composition in a vector application’. I sketched out some very simple and rough lines to look what scales would work the best. Later - in Photoshop - I’ve continued working on the composition (lots of ‘horizontal flips’), till it was balanced out right.

With the 2 days and 13- hours left it will be tight, but I still believe I can make something… interesting.

In this sketch I give you an idea of what it will look like if ‘such a Miyazaki-creature’ plays the cello on the toilet. Sound a bit odd, but the idea is that the sweat from playing intensive is drained off though the toilet, so that the conductor can live on…

Seems a complicated circle of life, but that circle of live of the Sixth Chamber is complicated too!

The sketch was just paper&(color)pencils&markers, but after scanning I added some touches of Photoshop.

More updates within 12 hours! Please tell me what you think of it so far, now I can still make changes very easily.

Well, this might not really be ‘line-art’, but I will use it as my lineart.

In this step I’ve been balancing the composition - in fact the first time I really paid attention to it - by endlessly horizontal flipping the image. I think that at this point, the composition is good enough to continue with. As I’m used to both versions (‘normal’ and ‘flipped one’), I’m still not sure which one I’ll be using in the final image. I think I’ll choose in a later stadium - maybe with your help.

Just a few lines to show what the eye-curve would look like. As I’m still not very experienced with this stuff, I’m only experimentating with this.

The gray grid exists of 3x3 rectangles, and the idea is that the main things are out of the centre (which I did not do very succesfull ). The yellow parts are the ‘main elements’, which should attract the eye. The red line is the eye-curve (beginning at the top). The blue line is an extended line of the tower, which will point your eye to the ‘orchestra’.

This is where I need your help: I need to choose between these two colorschemes: blueish in the dark parts and yellow in the light, or vice versa? I think the left one of these two images has an interesting atmosphere, as the bright yellow (sun-) light is coming from outside, and the dark parts are blueish. What do you think; which do you like the best?

Further: instead of the original idea of having an octopus ‘play’ with a conductor-marionette, I choosed to hang an astronaut there. Reason one: the original idea would ruin the composition (while the octopus would form a nice centre). Reason two: it would all get too complicated to paint. Reason three: it would not have to do anything with the theme. In the new idea I can show that this scene is in space.

One thing I still need to choose: how will the astronaut be controlled?! Please tell me which of the following you like the best:

He’s still alive, and just does do it himself

He’s dead and his arms are lifted by little birds (‘The birds in Snowwhite were strong enough to do what they done, so they’ll be strong enough to lift the astronaut’s arm’ ). It might give the scene an a bit more fairytail-y look, which might be interesting!

He’s dead and his arms are controlled by two storks that are standing on the astronaut’s helmet.

I know my entry is now getting veeery different from the general EON-entries, and I know I don’t really follow the rules (as I don’t think it has enough connection to serve as promotional material, which is in the rules), but I just hope to make something satisfying and to break the clichés.

Next step: modeling some simple 3D models, to get a simple lighted scene, as a base for the overpaint. Updates soon!

Time is getting tight (‘1 day, 23 hours’) (really stupid from me agáin, to wait till the last hours of a 5 month-contest), but I’m still confident I’ll finish it in time!

In this image you can see some of the simple 3D objects which I’ll be rendering to have a nice beginningpoint for the overpainting. The lights will be placed at the bottom (so that they’ll look like mushrooms), and the lightbulbs will be ‘living’ in the church-part.
The astonaut model is just a simple ‘biped’ which I posed into the right shape. In the end the arms of this conductor-astronaut will be controlled by two birds…

Time to move on with only 24 hours left! I’m still positive about it all, as I got it managed to get a day off tomorrow, so that I can work the whole day on it!

You’d really make me happy by telling me what you think of it so far.
-Gijs

Here’s a screenshot of my final 3D scene. It got more detailed than it was intended to be having, but at least it’s a great startingpoint for the brushwork/overpaint. At the time I’m rendering some lightingpasses to have a nice base for further work.

You might be thinking ‘that guy is never gonna make it’, but I keep positive! Just have to work on! Lots of updates within 8 hours and 23 minutes!
-Gijs